Did you know that you can make your very own Search Story video like Google’s Parisian Love that played as an ad during the Super Bowl?
They are a lot of fun, and it’s not hard at all. Think of how you might make one to highlight an upcoming event or cool attraction in your town.
Here’s what I learned while making one:
Be already logged into the YouTube account that you’re going to upload it to (I used our Tourism Currents YouTube channel) and be ready with your password again when it’s time to upload.
Try to use more than one of the available search options (Web, blogs, images, maps, etc.) It makes the video much more interesting visually.
Use fewer words in the search box. They’re easier to read at the rapid speed of the Search Story.
Pick those words carefully and know ahead of time what search results will come in (there’s a Preview button for you; I think I wore mine out.) I had one innocuous search term bring back something to do with strippers (don’t need people seeing that in my video, thanks very much.)
Listen to at least a snippet of all of the available “soundtrack” music. Some might be a surprisingly good fit.
Don’t be afraid to go back and edit if you aren’t happy with the final result. We won’t say how many times I re-did the video below, or I’d have to put up an “Anal-Retentive” warning sign on the blog.
Once it is uploaded to your YouTube channel (done automatically and FAST by Google) go back into the Edit function on your channel and make sure the video is titled, tagged and described, which helps with SEO (Search Engine Optimization.)
I’ll cut to the chase, because BlogWorld conference pass prices go up after September 16.
Why tourism and travel professionals need to go to BlogWorld and New Media Expo at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Oct 14-16:
1) Because to really grasp what social media and tech can do for your marketing and communications, you need to go where the geeks are.
2) Because our Tourism Track gives you a full day of training in social media for tourism…how to listen to the conversations that matter online, better video for tourism, blogger press trips/fam tours and more.
3) Because it will be participatory, hands-on, no fear training with me and my Tourism Currents co-founder Becky McCray, PLUS….
4) Because at BlogWorld, you’ll be able to get your tourism organization in front of thousands of bloggers, podcasters and video bloggers from around the world. Denise Wakeman from The Blog Squad calls it THE social marketing event of the season. Wired PR Works calls it one of her must-attend events.
If you want attention from online content creators (travel, food, parenting and every other sort of blogger) you have to know who’s who, speak their language and be where they can find you.
That means be in Las Vegas October 14-16.
If you use code TC20 you can knock 20% off of the price of any pass.
(This is a guest post by Jody Halsted about a cool conference in Iowa that is all about connecting and educating Midwest bloggers. I followed the conference hashtag on Twitter during last year’s version of it and was impressed, so I asked Jody to tell us a little bit more about it.)
In an effort to change the perception of the Midwest from a place to get away from to a place to explore and discover, the Destination Midwest event at the I_Blog Conference (update – now called the Social Technology Conference) will bring together Midwest bloggers and Midwest destinations for an evening of (virtual) travel, networking and the opportunity for mutually beneficial relationships!
According to the 2010 Ypartnership/Harrison Group 2010 Portrait of American Travelers, “1 in 4 family travelplanners consult a blog before booking” a vacation. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2010, people trust “people like them” more than TV news, search engines, and newspapers.
Blogs create community, build friendships and foster relationships. In our ever-increasingly connected world, a good blog will open your eyes to a world you never imagined and lead you places you never knew you wanted to visit!
Blogging has grown to include more than just written words on a page and is now the center of the social media wheel. By utilizing images, video techniques, Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare and Gowalla – just to name a few – a blogger can become a tour guide, travel resource, location expert and handy reference.
The Ypartnership/ Harrison Group study also shows that family travelers are more likely to have taken a vacation in their local area as an alternative to vacationing in a destination that would have required traveling a greater distance. By connecting with bloggers within a day’s drive from your destination, you will reach their local audience and increase your chances of being the “local area” vacation of their readers.
The Destination Midwest event at the I_Blog Conference takes place Saturday, November 6 from 6-10pm. Space is limited to 20 destinations; cost is $250 per destination.
If your destination is interested in learning more about social media, conference tickets are available at a discount for participants in Destination Midwest.
Note: Jody Halsted is working very hard to change the perception of the Midwest from a place to get away from to a place to explore and discover through her website Family Ramblingand articles she writes for other travel publications. She loves to work with destinations and share the unique adventures that are found only in the Midwest. As an example, she worked with the St. Louis CVC last summer; you can see the series she wrote about it here: http://familyrambling.com/index.php/exploring-st-louis/usa.
To create and publish great content (blog posts, Facebook Page Wall notes, videos, tweets) you need….
1) Lots of good ideas about something that interests you, a way to record those ideas and time to do so
2) An editorial calendar to coherently organize and schedule the ideas – expanded into content – for publication, and time to think about and work on the calendar
3) Structured blocks of time to create all of the great content that you’ve thought of, then organized and scheduled
Three simple things, and time ties them all together.
Number One is doing fine for me; I have a whole notebook of blog post ideas that I carry around, and I keep notecards by the bed in case of late-night rockets of brilliance to the brain. Read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life for more insights into organizing your ideas.
I used to be pretty good with Number Two, then fell off of the planning wagon, got tired of pulling content out of my left ear at the last minute, and stumbled wearily back to the calendar. The key is to schedule time to think through and craft the calendar, organize the content ideas and fit it all into your workflow. Go read Becky McCray’s post on the six most important things; it will help.
I am not doing so well at Number Three.
My basic schedule for keeping up with 3 blogs means a post for one of them each day, Monday through Friday (this blog is scheduled for every Tuesday and Friday. Ain’t happening, is it?)
This means I need a more functional schedule. It also means I am considering dropping one of the blogs for which I’ve run out of creative energy. In my Navy shipboard engineering days, the electricians called that “load-shedding”….dropping noncritical items off of the power grid to ensure power to vital systems and equipment.
It does not mean I need to “make time.”
You can’t “make time.” That goose is already cooked. No one gets extra helpings of time or special favors from the Wizard of Time.
Most of you know that I’m really big on getting “the ungeeked” to go to one or two tech-related conferences or events per year.
There is no more effective way to figure out how people are using technology and mobile devices right now to communicate; it’s the best market research you can do and it will put you way ahead of competitors who are still scratching their heads over Twitter (which really burst on the scene at SXSWi 2007, the South by Southwest Interactive tech conference, one of the world’s largest.)
Meantime, the Panel Picker is now open for SXSWi 2011 in March – one of the unique things about “South by” is that part of the panel selection process is pubic voting and commenting on the proposed panels. You can give your feedback whether you’re attending SXSWi or not; there is a quick and painless registration process to do so.
I’ve proposed a panel with myself and two other speakers – my Tourism Currents business partner Becky McCray and travel/tourism entrepreneur Andy Hayes.
Not having a website in 2010 is akin to not having a telephone number.
Why would you make it hard for customers to find you?
Why would you cede your online presence to TripAdvisor, UrbanSpoon, Yelp or Merchant Circle? That’s what I find when I Google you and you don’t have a website.
(In our Tourism Currents course – which is now open to new enrollments! – we call your online fans and supporters “online champions.” Please join us to find out more about using social media tools for connecting with visitors.)
Spend some time in the online world, and you’ll rapidly discover that those “online influencers” who all the marketing folks are chasing are only a part of the digital communications story.
Even worse, tourism PR and marketing is often fixated only on travel bloggers because they see them as an alternative to something they’re familiar with: print travel writers. They do not appreciate the possibilities offered by niche blogs, or the Long Tail’s impact on travel.
If you look beyond the Hype-o-Meter, there are plenty of people who blog sporadically, if at all, but have a significant online presence in other ways….
Photography with Flickr
Video on YouTube or Vimeo
Podcasting on iTunes or Blog Talk Radio
On Facebook
On Twitter
There are even people who are active and engaged in old-school forums and bulletin boards, like this forum on geocaching (and geocachers love to travel to new places to look for stuff.)
If you scoop them all up and dump them in one big “blogger” category like some of your less-savvy marketing peers are doing, you won’t have a complete picture of how to find those online champions.
Be smarter than that; have a more complete picture of the online space where you’re trying to compete for attention.
Welcome to this edition of the Carnival of Cities, where we tour the world in a single blog post.
Thanks very much to the Perceptive Travel blog for hosting the last edition; I’m still sorting out who will host the next one (am a bit behind on the email stack; sorry.)
If you’d like to host on your blog, please contact me at Sheila “at” sheilascarborough “dot” com. Thanks!
Shediac, New Brunswick, Canada Anne-Sophie Redisch presents PhotoFriday: A Big Thing in Canada posted at Sophie’s World, saying, “Shediac, NB – the world’s lobster capital – where else but Atlantic Canada!”
Omaha, Nebraska, USA Morgan Schwartz presents Body Scanners at Eppley Give Suburban Mom a Cheap Thrill posted at All Cracked Up by Vicky DeCoster, saying, “In between work, errands, and chauffeur service, Moms in Omaha might not have that many opportunities for excitement in their day. One Mom found the new body scanners at Eppley Airport good for a cheap thrill—and a little awkward self reflection.”
Are you responsible in some way for a festival or special event, and would like to get jump-started using social media to promote it?
I always advise including social media as an integral part of your overall marketing plan, not sticking it on as an afterthought, but sometimes you do need to push the train forward a bit even if all the track isn’t laid to the end.
Hey, it worked for the US Transcontinental Railroad….
If your festival or special event is coming up quickly, here are some things you can do to enhance your online presence, and then you’ll have a platform to build on more thoughtfully for next year:
1) Get a Facebook Page. Not a Group – a Page. Give more than one person administrative access to it. Your event logo is fine as an avatar. Put it in the Organization-NonProfit category; that’s probably the one that applies best to festivals. Fill out the Info section thoroughly, with event dates, location and times, simple directions from the main access points, links to your website and any other social media sites you have, and a contact email and phone number.
Put up a few Wall posts, especially some photos and short videos from last year’s event if you have them, and get the word out to your networks that some “Likes” of your Page would be appreciated. Once you get to 25, um, “Likers,” you can switch the Facebook URL to a more personalized one with your name.
Connect with your local CVB, DMO, state tourism office, town government, Chamber of Commerce and the businesses that sponsor your event, at a minimum.
2) Get a Twitter account. Make sure it’s something that approximates your event name, but is not too long (that uses up valuable characters and you only get 140 per tweet.) Make sure that more than one person can tweet from the account, and that you’re set up to tweet from mobile devices. Don’t worry about amassing a ton of followers right away; many won’t be the right folks anyway (unless you want to lose weight with acai berries.) You want people who care about and want to connect with your event.
See the Texas Book Festival – @texasbookfest – as an example.
Connect with your local CVB, DMO, state tourism office, town government, Chamber of Commerce and the businesses that sponsor your event, at a minimum.
3) Create a hashtag for your event. You don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to do so. A hashtag is a unique identifier for tweets related to your event, plus it can go in the descriptions of Flickr photos, YouTube videos, etc. Pick something short.
Make sure your followers know to use it; if you can get folks to use it, it will be easier to monitor your event as it occurs (I use hashtags all the time to follow conferences from a distance.)
4) Start thinking visually about coverage. Not a photo or video expert? Don’t let that stop you. Simply think hard about what sort of compelling visual opportunities may be coming up in your event….backstage excitement? Anything you can catch up close in rehearsal? Fun moments at the cotton candy concession? Get that digital point-and-shoot camera in your pocket and remember to use it liberally, including the video function that most of them now have.
Photos and videos are popular and evoke emotion and interest. They really amp up your Facebook Page and can also go up to Twitter via services like TwitPic and TwitVid.
If you have a smartphone, learn ahead of time how to shoot a photo and upload it from the phone to Facebook and Twitter. You can’t beat the ease and convenience of such coverage.
5) Tell your fans and supporters where to find you online. Put it up on posters, at the event entry and exit points, print it out on flyers and the festival map, announce it on the PA – let visitors know that you’d like to hear from them (before, during and after the fun) on Facebook and Twitter, and that they can post their best photos and video to your Wall.
I’ll be speaking at the 2010 TFEA (Texas Festivals and Events Association) annual conference this week about social media for special events; say hello if you see me there, or please leave a comment below if I missed a good tip.
Some of you may have noticed the orange Alltop banner on my right sidebar, the one that says “Visit MyAlltop page.”
Alltop is a site that aggregates feeds (headlines and the first part of posts/articles) from a huge variety of websites and blogs, sorted by topic.
The founders call it an “online magazine rack,” and it is one of the best tools we recommend at Tourism Currents for finding bloggers in many different niches, from big to very focused.
I’ll cut to the chase, because BlogWorld conference pass prices go up after September 16.
